UH-O and others

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Starting the new year with some music recommendations. It's kind of superfluous in an age when so many sites tabulate user preferences and then eagerly wait to see what you click on. All this blog can offer is the promise that (i) this will be fairly abstract and below-the-radar and (ii) not to check whether you actually follow the links.

Unicorn Hard-on has evolved quite a bit since her Myspace days. Her new LP Weird Universe comes digitally and on vinyl. (Am thinking that a label's willingness to make a record for you signifies that you've made it, whatever its ultimate value as a commodity.) I actually purchased the vinyl but you can sample the work YouTubically: check out "Rock Salt" and "Mysterious Prism."
My impression on hearing this music was that she has been performing live steadily the last few years and that has honed her sound. Working solely with Electribe grooveboxes and FX challenges you to stay out of the rut of repetition the sequencer keeps dragging you into. Normally piling one track on top of another over the course of a six minute song doesn't work too well compositionally but UH-O pulls it off here. The tracks add depth and texture instead of just getting louder. Am guessing this has something to do with having a live audience, or a long succession of live audiences, and determining ways to keep their interest with limited means. Weird Universe may be classified as noise or industrial but it hews closer to early '90s techno-trance with its clap delays and 303-ish fillips. There's some pitch-bending and stretching of samples in there too. A solid effort, well-nigh mythological boner inducing.

Found Groenland Orchester in the late '90s but hadn't heard their LP Nurobic before yesterday. This YouTube has bouncy geometric graphics to go with bouncy geometric music. Not all of their work sounds that pop. There's some genre-bending, even though it's essentially sampler-based or synth-based electronics, but what it mainly is, is restless, changing meters and melodies several times within a song, or even within a passage. Much appreciated for the lush ear candy throughout: this is art music to be enjoyed rather than endured.

Am coming very belatedly to Mapstation, which is one-third of To Rococo Rot (i.e., Stefan Schneider). Am recommending on the strength of one cut ("When You Collide") from a Staubgold label compilation and listening to some teaser clips from the LP it's from (A Way to Find the Day, 2002).

Happy new year, all.

ramp sphere

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kicker_ramp_sphere2

Class assignment: make the sphere-with-shadow (posted by FAUXreal, currently being beaten to death on dump) move up and down the skateboard ramp.
Originally I had six frames, made in MSPaint using cut-and-paste, but the sphere went double as it moved (even more than now). Am not using any tweening so the in-between frames had to be done by eye [ironic exclamation point].
Increased the frames to eight; a few had to be redone until the motion was smooth. The sphere now has a slight arc, but the motion of the shadow moves in a straight line. A more realistic animation would increase the diameter of the shadow as it moves to the right.
Grade: A-

music to the ears

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from Business Insider:

As part of a European Union-funded study on social media, we are running nine simultaneous 15-month ethnographic studies in eight countries. What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives. Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected. In response, the young are moving on to cooler things.

Twitter is "cooler"? Well, maybe five years ago. Soon the only people left on Facebook will be grandparents and the net art community. The latter joined in droves from 2008-2012 and got some crazy ideas about the significance of the move. The Brad Troemel "like economy" of cultural determination will continue to thrive in his mind, where it always resided. Ryder Ripps will hold art fairs elsewhere (or booths, whatever he did down in Miami). Hrag Vartanian might reconsider the relevance of an exhibition called #TheSocialGraph. No teens, no scene.

demonflower

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demonflower_by_julie

My contribution to the wendypaint.com genre (or as dumper "peggy" calls it, wendyvanitypaint).
On the plus side I like the combination of paint strokes with photocollage, or videocollage. (The gradients from all the dragging create a 3D effect that looks like cut up photos to me.)
On the minus side, these rubber-stamp or photoshop-brush style brushes are awfully clumsy. I searched for a way to shrink them to pencil width for some finer lines but couldn't figure out how to do it.
Also, couldn't figure out how to add my image to the "stream" so better hedge a prior statement about this site partaking of the "social" scene. It's possible that Kim Asendorf is "curating" the stream -- drop me an email if that's not so. [Update: Users publish to the "stream" by checking a small unidentified box with no "submit" button, leaving the drawing page, and praying to whatever deity or deities they worship -- should have known that, whoops]

canvas_painter_25b

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tommoody_canvaspainter25b

Various dumpers were playing around with Kim Asendorf's wendypaint.com website, created for The Wrong digital biennale. It's a pixel-y art platform where you can "make brushes" out of images or icons and drag them around to leave MSPaint-like trails. It reminded me about canvas painter, which I hadn't used in a while.
A dumper called canvas painter "excessively free software" in that you can download the javascript and make art in your browser from your home device, without any need to register and give your email and (uggh) real name, as Asendorf is requiring you to do. Also, you have to make your own screenshots (as in my painting above).
With wendypaint, Asendorf adds the all-important social dimension in that a community develops of wendypainters all sharing and archiving their drawings. This increases the likelihood of coverage on the "art and technology" websites, and of Asendorf being praised for circulationism, dispersion, and all the rest of that social utilitarian rhetoric.
The modest little canvas painter, while more "open source" than Asendorf's project, nevertheless lacks "social," bringing it closer to the dreaded hermeticism, that bugbear of new media prognosticators. Years ago I said Nasty Nets wasn't really social, because people just posted stuff and didn't talk about it all that much, which drew the ire of Marisa Olson, who informed me that all manner of back channel discussion was happening about Nasty Nets posts via chat and email (that implicitly, I had been excluded from -- nice).

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